Following the release of the PS5 Slim, rumors about the upcoming PS5 Pro have begun to sweep the Internet; while the PS5 Slim offered modest upgrades such as a new removable disk drive and additional storage, the (as of yet unconfirmed) PS5 Pro likely to be the upgrade that PlayStation gamers have been waiting for.

As reported by PCGamer, Sony's upcoming PS5 revision will feature an all-in-one AMD chip with an 8-core, 16-thread Zen 2 design. However, the boost clock is said to go up to 4.4 GHz; while the CPU will not be much improved from the standard PS5's, the PS5 Pro's GPU is said to undergo significant changes.

The PS5 Pro's GPU could be based on AMD's RDNA 3 architecture, but could also incorporate elements of RDNA 4. There are also rumors that the PS5 Pro's new GPU design will feature RDNA 4 ray-tracing units.

While improved ray tracing would be a welcome addition to the PS5 Pro, Sony's upgraded PS5 could also include an AI chip within the console's APU. as AMD has done with its mobile Ryzen chips, the chip in the PS5 Pro could include an XDNA 2 NPU or Neural Processing Unit could be included.

According to a post by ResetEra user RandomlyRandom67, this NPU will be "one of the core pieces of the PS5 Pro" to accelerate Sony's proprietary machine learning upscaling technology, similar to how the PS4 Pro used checkerboard rendering. The company says it will be used. If this is true, some of the PS5's best games could be upscaled to output at frame rates of 30 FPS or higher at 4K.

Earlier this week, Intel announced its new Meteor Lake chip with its own NPU designed to better handle AI workloads; AMD has done the same with its new Ryzen 8040 series mobile processors to do the same.

AI laptops are being touted by Intel as the next big thing, and the PS5 Pro may be the first time this technology is coming to a home console. However, since Microsoft's Xbox consoles also use AMD chips, the same may happen with the Xbox Series X/S revamp (codenamed Brooklin) in the fall of 2024.

The PS5 Pro is also rumored to be released around the same time, and if Sony is looking to harness the power of AI to improve gameplay and visuals in its current console revamp, there is no reason why Microsoft should not follow suit.

We will have to wait and see what both companies do with AI in the future, and the Nintendo Switch 2 may also include AI technology to improve upscaling when docked. That is if Nintendo decides to stick with a hybrid design for its next console.